Your First Week with Leaftide

Two ways in

After sign-up, Leaftide asks where you'd like to start. Your plants: add what you're growing, from tomatoes to apple trees. Your space: add your beds and pots at their real size, then put plants in them. Not sure what to grow? Browse ideas for ready-made garden plans.

Both lead to the same place, and they stay in sync: plants you add can go straight into your beds and pots.

After your first plant

Once you add a plant, things start happening. Predictions appear on Coming Up, showing when each lifecycle stage is expected (germination, transplanting, harvest). Care tasks generate automatically based on the plant's needs. The plant's own page shows its lifecycle stages and current progress.

Your dashboard becomes a daily check-in point.

The planning board

Plants you've added but haven't started growing yet live on the Planning Board. This is where you adjust dates, change the starting method, or remove something before committing. Once you record your first event for a plant (sowing, planting out), it moves from the Planning Board to Active.

Think of the Planning Board as your draft and Active as your live garden.

Check your location

Predictions are powered by climate data: growing degree days, frost windows, and local temperature normals. If predictions seem off or vague, check Settings, then Garden, then Location & Climate.

You can reset frost dates from historical data there, which recalculates your entire schedule. Getting this right makes a big difference in prediction accuracy.

The plot designer

Once you have a couple of plants, you might want to lay out your garden visually. The plot designer lets you draw beds, place plants, and see spacing at a glance. There's a dedicated guide for it with video walkthroughs: Plot Designer Guide.

What comes next

As you garden, Leaftide shows short tips when they help, like how to log a stage or where to find a feature you haven't tried yet. The guide page has answers to common questions as they come up.

The more you log, the closer your dates follow your own plants. Each stage you record moves that plant's later dates for the season, and for trees and perennials the dates you log shape next year's timing too.